Jim Karpen Tips

Free online typing instruction

August 2000

I've introduced hundreds of people to the Internet in various workshops, and I was always surprised that I'd get a few people who didn't know how to type. Some had seemingly never seen a keyboard before. I'd see them sitting there, hunting the keyboard for the right letters and pecking with a single finger.

The Internet is great, personal computers are great, but you need to know how to type. Voice recognition will someday soon obviate this skill, but for now it's necessary. And if you need to brush up on your skills, you can get some free instruction at Learn 2 Type .

I'd never had typing instruction, but luckily a friend showed me the finger positions when I bought my first typewriter (!) in college. Over the years I noticed that I had done so much typing that gradually I was doing it without looking at the keys and doing it fairly quickly. Still, when I tackled the exercises at Learn 2 Type, I found that there were things that I could definitely improve, including speed.

The site is free, but to use it you must register. This way their server can track your progress. They also ask a couple demographic questions.

The site begins with the basics: diagrams that show you a keyboard and where all your fingers should go. This section on basics also gives helpful ergonomic advice so that you can avoid injury.

Once you're familiar with the basics, then you launch into the six exercises. The first three focus on reinforcing the key locations with the associated finger motion. You begin by typing specific letters, and the site tracks your accuracy and the amount of time it took. Once you're comfortable with this and have gained some fluency, the next exercise adds punctuation.

In Exercise 3, it can start to get really challenging. There are multiple-character key strokes for each finger, and every single special character is usedÑsome of which I had never used before.

In Exercises 4 to 6 you type words, sentences, and paragraphs. At first you type simple words to increase your speed and accuracy. After struggling with the special characters such as ~ and ^ in the previous exercise, this was fun. And it not only tells you how accurate you are but also how many words per minute you're typing.

The later exercises introduce more complex words, along with capital letters, punctuation, and numeric characters. The opening screen says that there's a final test, but I didn't come across it.

To be honest, initially I wondered whether this site merited a column, but in the end I found it fun and useful.

© 2000 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#226)